We’re an increasingly confident lot, it seems

We’re are an increasingly confident lot: The YPO’s 1Q2017 global confidence survey was out last week, and we’ve just gotten around to pulling it out of our slush pile. Globally, business confidence is essentially stable, the survey found, with the big deviations from the trend coming in the Middle East (where executives reported the biggest decline in confidence of any region in this quarter’s survey) and in Africa (also down on last quarter). CEOs in Egypt are bucking the trend, the YPO says, reporting that “Egypt reported a significant gain in confidence … with a surge in confiden[ce] of 14.9 points to the firmly optimistic territory of 79.4.” You can check out the results of the global poll here with a number of cool interactive features, or dive straight into the YPO’s analysis of the MENA results. YPO bills its survey as “the only CEO economic sentiment indicator to span the globe on a quarterly basis.”